1984 - Planet eBook

person then as I am now. Or perhaps I would—I’m not certain.’‘Are you sorry you didn’t?’‘Yes. On the whole I’m sorry I didn’t.’They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. Hepulled her closer against him. Her head rested on his shoulder,the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeondung. She was very young, he thought, she still expectedsomething from life, she did not understand that to push aninconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.‘Actually it would have made no difference,’ he said.‘Then why are you sorry you didn’t do it?’‘Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In thisgame that we’re playing, we can’t win. Some kinds of failureare better than other kinds, that’s all.’He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She alwayscontradicted him when he said anything of this kind.She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individualis always defeated. In a way she realized that she herselfwas doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police wouldcatch her and kill her, but with another part of her mindshe believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secretworld in which you could live as you chose. All youneeded was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understandthat there was no such thing as happiness, that theonly victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead,that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it wasbetter to think of yourself as a corpse.‘We are the dead,’ he said.